How to get an honour in LC Biology

Galbin

I'm an adult doing LC biology this year. I originally signed up for it in October 2014 and the school told me there would only be two terms. So I thought the course would be completed by end of April. However, it turns out this is wrong and that the principal always leads ppl to believe this so he can make extra €€€ from a third term. As a result, we won't be finished till end of May. Plus, our teacher apparently won't have time to do all the topics.

I was told before I signed up for the course that it was totally doable as long as you put in some work. I didn't do any science subjects in my LC and I am now freaking out. I've studied all along*, but my memory is crap (due to health problems), so I've only now figured out a fix for this memory issue. It turns out I can get around this memory issue by writing everything out over and over. Then it stays in my brain. Trouble with finding this out now though is that there are only 2 months to the exam. I also have to learn off all the experiments without having done any of them.

I am so upset to find out that Biology has a high failure rate. I would be absolutely devastated if I failed. In fact, I'd rather not sit the exam than fail it. However, I've spent so much money on exam fees, course fees, transport to the school etc., so I have to sit the exam. Can anyone help me out with any advice? What can I do to get an honour?

I got the impression that one would be okay if they were to study these areas very well:
Genetics
Experiments
Plants
Ecology

Is this correct?

*I may as well have not studied at all!

Bazinga_N

Galbin wrote: »

I'm an adult doing LC biology this year. I originally signed up for it in October 2014 and the school told me there would only be two terms. So I thought the course would be completed by end of April. However, it turns out this is wrong and that the principal always leads ppl to believe this so he can make extra €€€ from a third term. As a result, we won't be finished till end of May. Plus, our teacher apparently won't have time to do all the topics.

I was told before I signed up for the course that it was totally doable as long as you put in some work. I didn't do any science subjects in my LC and I am now freaking out. I've studied all along*, but my memory is crap (due to health problems), so I've only now figured out a fix for this memory issue. It turns out I can get around this memory issue by writing everything out over and over. Then it stays in my brain. Trouble with finding this out now though is that there are only 2 months to the exam. I also have to learn off all the experiments without having done any of them.

I am so upset to find out that Biology has a high failure rate. I would be absolutely devastated if I failed. In fact, I'd rather not sit the exam than fail it. However, I've spent so much money on exam fees, course fees, transport to the school etc., so I have to sit the exam. Can anyone help me out with any advice? What can I do to get an honour?

I got the impression that one would be okay if they were to study these areas very well:
Genetics
Experiments
Plants
Ecology

Is this correct?

*I may as well have not studied at all!

Really sorry to hear about your situation! In terms of the exam paper, you're really cutting yourself thin with just those sections.

In Section A, you've to answer 5 out of 6 questions. Genetics, Plants and Ecology do come up but they might only be 3 of the questions. What about the other 2 you've to answer? It's unlikely that one of those topics would come up in the same section twice.

In Section B, you've 3 experiments questions and you have to answer 2. If you cover all the experiments you should be fine here although you'll probably lose the 6 marks for part (a) of each question as it's about the topic rather than the experiment.

In Section C , you've to answer 4 out of 6 questions. The final two questions here give you a choice of answering two from parts (a), (b) and (c). Even still though, you've only covered 3 topics. Which means it's unlikely you'll be able to answer 4 questions.

I'd personally recommend you try your hardest to do the following:

• Food & Nutrition (I think it comes up a bit)
• Ecology
• Plants
• All of the Cell Biology (there's not many chapters)
• Genetics
• Experiments

So really everything apart from the Human Biology :eek: Of course there's a huge risk leaving out such a big part of the course but with the help of luck you might be okay with it.

If you find you have time to ask scan through the rest of the course it'd be a huge help! Even just practicing exam papers and marking schemes on just these it'd be of huge benefit.

There's some useful notes to be found here:
http://www.thephysicsteacher.ie/leavingcertbiologyhome.html

and here:
http://leavingbio.net/

They might help! Best of luck with it all!